Page 26 of A Spell for Midwinter’s Heart

The Fourth Day of Yule

An inundation of social media links greeted Rowan on waking. Accounts for the festival now existed on all major platforms, already filled with posts and cross-posted with Naomie’s personal account. Zaide and Naomie couldn’t have slept much from the amount of content they’d already put up.

While most of the images were Naomie’s signature style, there were a few particularly well-edited videos featuring corvids that must have come from Kel.

A clip of a crow snatching a full pretzel from the public house before speeding off to a snowy tree with a cackle of delight was already doing numbers.

They’d amassed a respectable number of followers for being up for less than twelve hours. While it was far from “a plan,” it was the start of something. There would be time to mull all that later. For now, she had to get ready.

For my date, she thought with a surge that was equal parts excitement and nervous terror.

In the living room, her mother and father were reading quietly by the fireplace, mugs of steaming tea sitting on the coffee table.

It was rare to catch them in a moment of stillness.

Liliana was sitting so that her feet rested in Joe’s lap, and he rubbed them idly with the hand not holding the book.

It was good to see them together. They both kept themselves busy enough that she worried they’d inevitably drift apart, but they always found their way straight back to one another.

As a child, Rowan had loved hearing the story of their courtship, featuring a search through the city of Heidelberg, Germany, when Joe nearly lost his chance to ask the bewitching young woman who’d been staying at his hostel to have a drink before she left town.

Instinct had guided him to her exact location, and it had been that way forever since.

Liliana made to stand as Rowan descended. “Don’t get up on my account. I’m eating out.”

“Oh,” said her mother, glancing Joe’s way, “with Zaide?” Her tone was far too innocent. Her mother had minions all over the festival grounds. Someone had probably seen Rowan leaving with Gavin. There was no sense in keeping anything from Liliana Midwinter in the town of Elk Ridge.

“No, with Gavin.” She took a deep breath, knowing her mother would not be happy about what she said next. “It’s a date. I’m going on a date with Gavin.”

“Well, that’s overdue,” said Joe with a chuckle, looking up from his book.

Rowan frowned. Had everyone thought the two of them were a couple in the making? Why had it been so obvious to everyone but the parties involved?

Well, everyone but Liliana Midwinter. She shot her husband an irritated look and then fixed her gaze back on Rowan. “He’s Dennis’s son.”

“But also Sarah’s,” countered Joe. Liliana’s look of irritation intensified.

“His mom was your best friend,” said Rowan.

“She was…” conceded Liliana. She hesitated, but then her expression firmed. “But things changed when she married Dennis.”

“Did she change?” asked Rowan.

Liliana considered the question. “No, she was always Sarah. But things got…complicated.”

“If anyone changed, it was Dennis,” said her father.

“Really?” asked Rowan.

“He acted like he had,” said her mother with a snort. “Sarah was a good influence on him. After she died, though…” Her face darkened. “Well, he went right back to being a McCreery.”

“Gavin’s more his mother than his father,” said Rowan, driven to defend him.

“You’ve spent…how long with him? Recently.”

Rowan flushed. “Not that long, I guess. But I know. ”

Her mother’s gaze was fixed, demanding concession. “And I know the McCreerys. They have always tried to run things around here, thinking they know what’s best…”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” murmured Joe, not looking up from his book.

Liliana glowered in his direction. “One of them was part of the mob that hanged Florence Midwinter.” Both Rowan and her father winced at the reminder, and Joe visibly shrank an inch or two. “They exist to push us down when we try to stand tall.”

There was a flicker of something that passed through Rowan at that. Like a chill winter wind. Everything in her body ran cold, right down to her fingertips. She wanted to insist that Gavin would never, but something held her back. Something pushed her to heed her mother’s warning.

“It’s just breakfast,” she said finally, rushing to don her cold-weather gear. As if she might actually lose her nerve and stand him up if she hung around long enough.

Her mother’s voice was one last time demanding of attention. “Does he know what we are?”

“Everyone knows what we are,” said Rowan, flippant as she shoved on her coat.

And then her mother was there beside her, arms across her chest, gaze fixed. “But there’s knowing and there’s knowing. Does he understand we actually use magic? Does he believe it?”

The words took Rowan and forced her to look at the situation from the angle she’d been desperately avoiding ever since the moment their lips met and she had felt so good.

Good in a way she couldn’t remember having felt in years—fully in her body, present and accounted for.

With him. No second-guessing, just blissful sensation.

“No. I don’t think so,” she admitted, finally, her heart falling. The phrase harmless self-actualization practice danced in her head in Gavin’s voice, but it wasn’t clear exactly when she’d heard him say it.

“Well, Dennis does,” said her mother, finally stepping away and releasing Rowan, “and that’s why he’d love nothing more than for us to leave Elk Ridge.”

The warning was clear.

Rowan arrived in town assuming that they would hunt down the least miserably crowded breakfast spot together. Instead, Gavin waited near his Subaru. When she got close, he sprang off the car and opened the passenger door, gesturing her inside.

“Okay, where are we going?” she asked with a bubbling laugh.

His eyes danced. “It’s a surprise.”

The highway guided them up the side of the mountain.

The higher they climbed, the more the snow deepened, and the forests thickened, the sides of the mountain growing ever more sheer and sharp.

She tried to trace pathways down the slopes, wondering how anyone determined which were safe to ski on and which led to certain doom.

“Feel free to put on some music,” said Gavin. He reached over to unlock his cell phone before darting his hand back to the wheel. The phone’s wallpaper was an image of him with his father. They were smiling together in ski gear, but it was not the Elk Ridge Ski Area they posed in front of.

Catching her studying it, he said, “Switzerland.”

“Fancy. Do you two travel together much?”

He nodded. “Every year. Usually somewhere with skiing.”

“No beach vacations for you two?”

“I let my ex drag me to Hawaii, but otherwise, no. The scuba diving was nice, but too crowded. Warm-water dives always are.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying you willingly spend time in cold water?”

He chuckled. “That’s what dry suits are for, and yes, I do.

Better visibility, and no crowds. When it’s just you and your diving partner down there, you feel like you’ve actually left the human world behind.

It’s the closest we can get to experiencing the unknown—even the mountains are tamed by comparison…

” His voice trailed off. He glanced her way and cleared his throat. “So, how about you: mountain or beach?”

“I don’t vacation much. I’ve gotten to the beach a few times since I moved to Orange County, though. It’s a long way to go by bus, but I was dating someone with a car, and he loved to surf.”

“Did you ever try surfing?”

“We have discussed my center-of-balance troubles,” she said with a laugh. “No. I mostly read. Swam a little. Tried not to spiral on images of him emerging lifelessly from the water every time he fell off the board.”

He glanced her way with a curious look but didn’t pry. The relentless nature of intrusive thoughts was more of a second- or third-date conversation, she guessed.

Finally opening the music app on his phone, she was shocked to find an enormous catalog of playlists.

All labeled not only by activity but also by subactivity.

From a glance, it seemed Exercise had at least ten different subcategories, as did Cooking and Work.

She chuckled at the one labeled Work—De-rage.

Tapping his phone, she said, “This is, uh, kind of a lot, Gavin.”

His brow creased. “How do you organize yours?”

“I have a few for different moods, but mostly I kind of…”

“Don’t say it,” he said, noticeably cringing.

“…add everything to one giant list.”

He briefly closed his eyes and shook his head with a groan.

Her attention caught on one labeled Long Walk on a Foggy Night. Needing to know what it meant, she pressed play. Heady soundscapes of atmospheric instrumental post rock filled the space between them.

The playlist was part of an entire subcategory of walk- and hike-related playlists, the sight of which stirred her brain into an overdrive of possibilities. What hikes had he done around Elk Ridge? Had he ever been to the abandoned silver mine?

Had he done the Chain Lakes loop on a hot day and known the pleasure of eating blueberries right off the trail before jumping into alpine melt to cool off?

Her brain delivered a full list of trails she wanted to take him on before stopping to wonder—did he have any hidden gems of his own? What could he share with her?

The car continued to climb the mountain until her ears gave a sharp pop. “Are we going to the ski area?”

“No…” he said with a shake of his head, “but we will park there.”

“Won’t it be as packed as anything on Christmas Eve?”

“We get to use employee parking.” He feigned a cross look. “Now stop trying to ruin the surprise.”